The Parts Men Play eBook

He stared at her, dumbfounded. Her eyes were
glowing, and her lips were parched with the fever
of the breath passing through them.

‘A joke?’ he said. ’Great
heavens! Do you think I would jest on such a
subject?’

’But——­ You mean that we women
should organise, rise up, to hinder our men from going
to war?’

‘Doesn’t your heart tell you how infamous
war is?’

‘What does that matter?’

‘But, Elise,’ he pleaded desperately,
’some one must be great enough to rise to the
new citizenship of the world even if martyrdom be the
condition of enrolment. It is far, far harder
than snatching a musket and sweeping on with the mob,
but it is for people like you and me to have the courage
to try to stem this flood of ignorance, to stop this
butchery of women’s hearts.’

‘Women’s hearts!’ She laughed hysterically.
’And you believe that you understand women!
Do you think war appals us? Do you think because
we may shed tears that it is from self-pity?
Rubbish! There are thousands of us to-night
who could almost shout for joy.’

‘Elise!’

’I mean it. Don’t you see that to-night
our whole life has been changed? Men are going
to die—­horribly, cruelly—­but
they’re going to play the parts of men.
Don’t you understand what that means to us?
We’re part of it all. It was the
women who gave them birth. It was the women who
reared them, then lost them in ordinary life—­and
now it’s all justified. They can’t
go to war without us. We’re partners at
last. Do you think women are afraid of war?
Why, the glory of it is in our very blood.’

‘But,’ cried Selwyn, ‘you can’t
think what you are saying.’

’I don’t want to. All I know is
that I could sing and dance and go mad for the wonder
of it all.’

He took a step forward and grasped both her wrists
in his hands.

‘Listen to me,’ he said, his jaw stiffening
as he spoke; ’some of us have got to keep our
sanity in this crisis. You know better than I,
for you have described it to me, that this country
has been darkened with ignorance just as Germany and
the rest have been. This is the climax of it
all—­and you’re going to help it on,
instead of having the courage to take your stand.
Elise, to-night I pledged my whole life to a crusade
against the darkness that men are forced to endure.
It is going to be a long fight, and perhaps a hopeless
one, although some day, somehow, the cause must win.
And I need your inspiration. Oh, my dear, my
dear, you must know how much I love you. Every
minute that you’re away I’m hungry for
you. When we were together that evening by the
stream I longed so to take you in my arms that my
heart ached with the repression I forced on myself.
I have known that there were a thousand difficulties
in the way, and I was not going to speak, but the
other night when you met your brother by the oak’——­